In his blog, Harry talked about such things as embargoed press releases and the use of less then impressive third party references in such releases. These are all valid issues, but ones that only someone new to the reporting process would mention.

Look for more of these “learning moments” to appear in blogs as companies continue to court bloggers for product news coverage. This is not a bad thing! But it is worth noting.

Below are my comments to Harry on his blog. Be sure to visit his site to see the other comments. Keep up the good work, Harry.

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Hi Harry. First, nice coverage!

Second, I’ve got to agree with Ry. Most PR folks and especially journalists are not that sinister. From the journalist side, pre-embargoed briefings are as much a matter of work flow timing (allocation of resources) as anything else. There are so many things that deserve coverage, but not enought journalists to cover them.

In the past, journalists used to have editorial planning meetings with all the major companies to make sure all the important technical topics were covered in a year’s time. Naturally, vendors used this to their advantage, hoping to time technology coverage with product releases. But back when journalists covered the entire industry, such vendor specific advantage was minimal since all of technology was being covered anyway.

Just be to clear, I’m talking about cover that consists of actual content development (such as your blog) – which is what journalists used to do (and a few still do it). Not merely removing the adjectives from a press release and pitching it as content.